Counteroffer in budget talks

Budget talks opened Thursday between Republicans and the White House, with the administration offering up modest new cuts, designed mostly to alter the political map going into test floor votes next week in the Senate.

More discussions are expected in the next several days, and, as the talks proceed, the floor votes could serve to show the rank and file in both parties that more compromise is needed.

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Final agreements on this procedure had not been fully set Thursday night, but the hourlong session off the Senate floor ended cordially enough that Republicans deferred to Vice President Joe Biden to deliver a terse summary: “We had a good meeting, and the conversation will continue.”

The additional $6.5 billion in cuts put forward by the White House must still be spelled out by Senate Appropriations Committee Democrats, who began meeting downstairs in the Capitol as the vice president and his team were leaving.

More than two-dozen accounts have been identified as potential targets for cuts, with the biggest pieces coming from agriculture, EPA state revolving funds, and FEMA state and local grants. Reflecting some of its 2012 budget proposals, the administration signaled a greater openness to cuts state and local law enforcement grants and rescinding $500 million from the WIC program for low income mothers and their infants.

Together with prior reductions, the administration can now argue that it has moved more than halfway toward the Republican campaign goal of cutting $100 billion from President Barack Obama’s 2011 budget requests. But that ignores the fact that the whole intellectual framework behind the $100 billion pledge has always been the GOP’s promise to roll back domestic and foreign aid appropriations to 2008 levels set by the Bush administration.

This remains the heart of the standoff, and even with the added cuts the administration and congressional Democrats are still about $51 billion short of the reductions approved by the House for the remainder of the fiscal year. To bridge this gap will require more give by the president, but he must also help House Republican leaders by drawing a sharper line about what their new tea party freshman class can expect to get past his desk.

“What is clear is no matter what math you use, Republicans won’t get everything they want, and Democrats won’t get everything they want,” said Dan Pfieffer, the White House communications director.

The background to the talks now is an almost six months-long impasse over appropriation levels for the fiscal year that began last Oct.1. To an unprecedented degree, the entire government, including war funding, has been subject to a series of interim continuing resolutions,the most recent of which, enacted Wednesday, will expire on March 18.

Democrats have themselves to blame for failing to adopt a 2011 budget last spring and summer. But Republicans compounded the problem after the November elections by blocking successive compromise efforts, all of which cut tens of billions of dollars from Obama’s initial requests from a year ago.

The GOP’s strong desire then was to set up this fight, forcing an early confrontation with Obama to bring the White House to the table. But after taking power in January, the leadership lost control to tea-party forces that insisted on doubling the level of cuts and, by doing so, drove off swing House Democrats and guaranteed a veto fight with the president — and a possible shutdown.